If you spend a lot of time working on your computer, whether for business or pleasure, there is little doubt that you have amassed a great deal of invaluable data. Sure, you can take steps to prevent data loss such as backing up your information onto multiple drives, an external drive or even burning data to an optical disc. But these measures typically only protect you against hardware failure or possibly theft. What would happen if your house caught fire and burned to the ground, or a flood passed through and totally destroyed all of your home’s contents?

Unless you have your data backed up at a remote location, odds are you are out of luck. Stuff like music and videos can be replaced, but other items such as family photos or business-related data are priceless.

We recently caught wind of ioSafe, a company that specializes in manufacturing disaster proof hardware specifically for the types of catastrophes mentioned above. ioSafe offers products ranging from external USB-style enclosures to full out RAID and NAS storage systems. Today we will be taking a look at their 500 GB Solo series USB External Hard Drive.

Our review sample arrived in a plain white cardboard box and was encased in the foam carton you see above. Included in the box is the enclosure, USB cable, power cable, power adapter and user manual. The enclosure itself had traces of white powder on it but a notice comes packaged with the system stating this is a harmless, non-toxic dust that the fire proof insulation may give off. You can simply clean it off with a soft damp cloth. Below is a complete list of specifications, borrowed from ioSafe’s website.

These are some pretty serious claims with regard to water and fire specifications and we fully intend to test both. Continue ahead as we take a closer look at the ioSafe Solo series external drive...